A Collection of Nightmares by Christina Sng

April 10, 2019

Hold your screams and enter a world of seasonal creatures, dreams of bones, and confessions modeled from open eyes and endless insomnia. Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares is a poetic feast of sleeplessness and shadows, an exquisite exhibition of fear and things better left unsaid. Here are ramblings at the end of the world and a path that leads to a thousand paper cuts at the hands of a skin carver. There are crawlspace whispers, and fresh sheets gently washed with sacrifice and poison, and if you’re careful in this ghost month, these poems will call upon the succubus to tend to your flesh wounds and scars.

These nightmares are sweeping fantasies that electrocute the senses as much as they dull the ache of loneliness by showing you what’s hiding under your bed, in the back of your closet, and inside your head. Sng’s poems dissect and flower, her autopsies are delicate blooms dressed with blood and syntax. Her words are charcoal and cotton, safe yet dressed in an executioner’s garb.

Dream carefully.You’ve already made your bed.The nightmares you have now will not be kind.And you have no one to blame but yourself.

LOHF team members Emily and Toni are dark poetry fans and have a few things to say about A Collection of Nightmares.

Emily’s Teaser Review

This book is definitely dark, but it’s not as bleak as some others I have read. There’s still some hope in these poems even though they are focused on nightmares. A Collection of Nightmares is a great book, and I would love to read more from Christina Sng!

Toni’s Teaser Review

I really loved Sng’s writing style. I had a really hard time putting this collection down. The art on the cover was beautiful. This collection made my heart happy and I can’t wait to read more from Sng. If everything else is as wonderful as A Collection of Nightmares then I can’t wait!!

About Christina Sng

Christina Sng is an award-winning poet, writer, and artist. Her work has been published in numerous print and online venues worldwide and translated into six languages. She is the author of A Constellation of Songs (Origami Poems Project), Catku (Allegra Press), 2017 Elgin Award nominee An Assortment of Sky Things (Allegra Press), 2018 Elgin Award runner-up Astropoetry (Alban Lake Publishing), and 2017 Bram Stoker Award® winner A Collection of Nightmares (Raw Dog Screaming Press).

In 2002, 2003, and 2004, her poems “The Marvel of Flight” and “Crimes of Our Youth” (Wicked Hollow #1 and #4), “The Bone Carver” (ChiZine), “The Art of Weaving” (Flesh & Blood #14), and “Asunder” with Mike Allen (Star*Line), received Honourable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Annual Editions, respectively. In 2007 and 2014, her poems “Medusa in LA” and “Allegra” (Tales of the Talisman Vol. 1 Issue 1 and Vol. 10 Issue 3) were nominated for the Rhysling Award in the short and long poem categories. In 2016, her poems “Twenty Years” (New Myths 32) and “The Woman in the Coffee Shop” (LONTAR #5) were nominated in the long poem category and her scifaiku, “The Man with Red Eyes” was nominated for the Dwarf Stars Award. Her long poem “The Leviathans of Europa” (Polu Texni) was nominated for the 2017 Rhysling Awards. 2018 Rhysling nominees include short poem “Starlight” (Space & Time), and two long poems, “Moonlight in the Playground” (Spectral Realms) and “Little Red” (Polu Texni). 4 short poems were nominated for the 2018 Dwarf Stars Awards: “Bloody Spindle”, “Ruby Sky”, “Seconds Before”, and “Multiverse Theory”. Her haiku sequence “Little Red in Haiku”, which first appeared in Star*Line 40.4 in 2017, received an Honourable Mention in the Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten.

She is a Lifetime member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and an Active member of the Horror Writers Association.

From late 2015, Christina began to study haiku, finding it immensely beautiful and therapeutic. Now she writes daily to document her thoughts and days. Her haiku, senryu, haiga, and tanka have since received numerous honours and accolades, including most recently, winning the 2018 Jane Reichhold International Prize and the Third Annual Jane Reichhold Memorial Haiga Competition. Her work has appeared all around the world in journals such as A Hundred Gourds, Akisame, Akitsu Quarterly, Asahi Haikuist, bear creek haiku, cattails, Cricket, Failed Haiku, Frameless Sky, Frogpond, Haikuniverse, Haiku Masters, hedgerow, Mayfly, otata, Prune Juice, Ribbons, Shamrock, The Bamboo Hut, The Cicada’s Cry, and Wild Plum, among others.

As an artist, she paints in oil, watercolour, and ink. In 2017, she began to market her art to magazines. Her oil painting “The Last Day” appeared on the cover of Gnarled Oak in January 2018 and her black and white watercolour painting “Waiting Together” was the cover art for Dreams and Nightmares #109, which is incidentally, the same magazine that gave her her first two poetry sales back in 2000.

Christina is also an avid gardener and an accomplished musician, and can be found most days in a dark corner deadheading her flowers while humming Vivaldi to the swaying branches.